Idols of the Odeons: Post-war British film stardom

By Andrew Roberts

Idols of the Odeons examines British film stardom in the post-war era, a time when Hollywood movies were increasingly supplanting the Pinewood/Elstree studio system. The book encompasses the careers of sixteen actors, including Stanley Baker, Diana Dors, Norman Wisdom, Hattie Jacques, Peter Finch and Peter Sellers. Such extremely diverse careers provide the opportunity to explore overlooked films, in addition to examining how the term ‘star’ could apply to a stalwart leading man, a Variety comic, a self-created ‘Vamp’ and a character actor. Above all, this is a book that celebrates, with idiosyncratic humour and warmth, how these actors accomplished much of their best work during the transitional period between the Rank/ABPC roster of stars and the US domination of the British film industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526147028

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts is the author of Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West (which won the International Churchill Society Book Award) and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 (which won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Book Award). His other books include Napoleon and Wellington, Eminent Chuchillians and Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize. His latest book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, won the British Army Military Book of the Year for 2010. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a PhD in History from Cambridge University.

Book preview

Idols of the Odeons

Idols of the Odeons

Post-war British film stardom

Andrew Roberts

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Andrew Roberts 2020

The right of Andrew Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4703 5 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Sharon

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Senior leads: Meet the chaps

Jack Hawkins: ‘Stand by, number one’

John Mills: ‘Do push off, there’s a good chap’

Kenneth More: Hawling like a brooligan

Younger leading men

Stanley Baker: The British Brando?

Laurence Harvey: The talented Mr Skikne

Leading ladies

Sylvia Syms: Never your typical ‘nice blonde’

The one and only Diana Dors: Britain’s ‘bad blonde’

The comics

Norman Wisdom: ‘Mr Grimsdale!’

Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips: A tale of two cads

Ladies and gentlemen of character

Sidney James: Jo’burg’s favourite cockney

James Robertson Justice: ‘What’s the bleeding time?’

Margaret Rutherford: Not to be crossed

Hattie Jacques: Matron and mistress of misrule

The art of screen acting

Peter Finch: The ‘actor’s actor?’

Peter Sellers: ‘There used to be a me but I had him surgically removed’

Conclusion

Filmography

Index

Figures

1 Jack Hawkins in The League of Gentlemen (1960)

2 John Mills in Escapade (1955)

3 Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

4 Stanley Baker in Hell Drivers (1957)

5 Laurence Harvey in Romeo and Juliet (1954)

6 Sylvia Syms in Victim (1961)

7 Diana Dors in I Married a Woman (1958)

8 Norman Wisdom in Follow a Star (1959)

9 Terry-Thomas in School for Scoundrels (1960)

10 Leslie Phillips in Doctor in Clover (1966)

11 Sidney James in Carry On Constable (1960)

12 James Robertson Justice in Doctor in Clover (1966)

13 Margaret Rutherford in Murder Most Foul (1964)

14 Hattie Jacques in Our House (1960)

15 Peter Finch in Judith (1966)

16 Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Acknowledgements

This book could neither have commenced nor been completed without the support of Matthew Frost, Sharon Auldyth Morris, Lars Mosesson and Julian Petley.

Introduction

Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time. (Fisher 2012: 19)

To commence on a reasonably self-indulgent note, during the 1970s most provincial towns contained at least one tatty bingo hall that had once been the local ABC or Odeon picture house. As for the handful of cinemas that still existed in town centres, they were often in a profoundly sorry state of repair. For many of my background, a birthday visit to the pictures meant passing through peeling mock Ionic columns, buying strange brands of confectionery that any discerning child would otherwise avoid and settling into plush red seats that exuded clouds of dust. The bill of fare would usually commence with cigarette advertisements promising a jet-set world that was entirely at odds with the surroundings both in and outside of the venue. The next part of the ritual was the promotions for local businesses,¹ regularly enhanced by still photographs that appeared to be a decade out of date.

You would not have to be supernaturally observant to appreciate, however dimly, that these venues were fast becoming ghosts, for all the billboards promising thrills, excitement and Dave Prowse sporting what appeared to be a coal scuttle on his head. When my own cinemagoing commenced, a visit to the Odeon on Above Bar Street was an occasional treat on par with a visit to the Little Chef,² but even so, Southampton’s picture houses seemed just as much a relic of a recent but unattainable past. They seemed akin to the red and cream Corporation Guy Arab double-deckers or those ageing Teddy boys who frequented the Marlands bus station café. As for the stars who once provided the highlight of the week, along with the B-feature and the newsreel, they could now be found as flickering images on a twenty-inch TV screen, providing visions of the day just before yesterday.

Some of the actors in this book have screen careers that commenced in the 1930s, a few were making films well into the twenty-first century, but my focal period is their pictures of the 1950s. Their major productions of the 1940s, 1960s and 1970s will be included, but for each of the actors, it was this decade that arguably served as a fulcrum of their film work. During this period images of ‘Britishness’ – including those actors born overseas – appeared to be serving as a virtual defence mechanism at a time of seismic change for the film industry. Regular picturegoing declined into an occasional treat akin to a visit to the theatre. In 1950 some 1,396 million people in the UK ‘visited 4,483 cinemas. By 1959 this had diminished to about 600m[illion] attendances and only 3,414 cinemas’ (Armes 1978: 239). The older members of the ‘family audience’ increasingly preferred television; John Sparos argued in his survey of the British film industry that one reason for the medium’s popularity was ‘that each visit to the cinema has a price whereas switching on is virtually costless’ (1962: 29). Another was that the surviving venues were increasingly ill-maintained and as early as 1958 an editorial in Films and Filming complained, ‘Many of Britain’s remaining 4,100 cinemas are obsolete, poorly equipped and badly managed shells’ (In Camera 1958: 16).

This was also the decade when the Rank Organisation and the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) maintained a stable of artists. Such traits, according to Pinewood and Elstree studio public relations (PR), encompassed jollity and good manners and when Laurie Lee visited the 1957 Cannes Festival, he came across an array of poles that bore the images of the ‘cosy pantheon of Pinewood stars – brother, sister, scout-leader, and nurse’ (1957: 16). The studio’s twenty-first-anniversary brochure of the same year listed some thirty-one artists under contract to the Rank Organisation, but within three years the future of the British cinema was one of independent actors and directors using the studio facilities. The ‘Britishness’ of such actors, including overseas-born stars, was emphasised in newspaper advertisements and studio publicity at a time when US investment within the UK film industry was ever-increasing. The Eady Levy³ of 1950 included US-backed productions (Stubbs 2009: 5) and between 1954 and 1956 the proportion of British films distributed by US firms doubled (Harper and Porter 2003: 30).

In 1962 Vincent Canby stated that, ‘American investment in British production has made it almost impossible to define a British film’ (quoted in Balio 2010: 229). As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes, ‘Involve an American major in the package and certain other consequences will also follow’ (2004: 53). One such was the use of a US lead, sometimes regardless of their relevance to the plot, from Shelley Winters in Alfie (Lewis Gilbert 1966) or William Holden’s Sefton in The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean 1957).⁴ By the mid-1960s Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Julie Christie featured in pictures where Hollywood monies shaped the national identity but, as with any form of history, periodisation in cinema is seldom rigid. MGM funded several 1960s black-and-white horse-brass strewn visions of ‘quaint’ English life; the UK was an important Hollywood sales territory and because of the Eady Levy’s rewards to commercially successful productions, ‘it was in the interest of Hollywood producers to make their British films as appealing as possible to British audiences’ (Stubbs 2009: 7). John Russell Taylor cited the paradox that in the 1930s it was Michael Balcon who ‘headed the most substantial attempt to bring American money into British films – financing the images of the national identity via Hollywood funds (1974: 80). Thirty years later the United Artists-funded 007 films featured a British Establishment figure – ‘when Connery says that drinking un-chilled champagne is like listening to the Beatles without ear-muffs, the entire swinging sixties collapse’ (Winder 2006: 201).

A further element in shaping the image and the memory of a film star is, of course, critics and I have included a cross-section from major newspapers to popular magazines to film journals from both the UK and the USA. One element that is highly notable across many titles is a palpable sense of disdain towards certain performers and another is a sense of ire at the very notion that cinema might be considered ‘art’. In 1947 C. A. Lejeune, the film critic of the Observer from 1928 to 1960, wrote: ‘If filmmakers would only stick to their province, which is to entertain, beguile and inform the largest possible number of people with the best mechanical means at their command, and leave all the pompous talk of art alone, how much happier they and we should be!’ (1947: 2). Anger at American cultural influences on cinematic depictions of British life was another popular topic for certain critics and Freda Bruce Lockhart ranted that: ‘The current arrangement by which a proportion of the profits from Hollywood films must be spent here seemed a fair enough makeshift. But it in turn is breeding at an alarming rate a more menacing monster than any [that] has yet threatened the cinema in these islands. I mean the Anglo-American film’ (1950: 12).

Fan magazines initially appear far removed from those critics who reviewed a picture in the manner of an irate housemaster – ‘Use of too many American phrases in the script. C-minus; must try harder’ – but they were equally instrumental in shaping an actor’s identity. Steve Chibnall points out of Britain’s major fan titles Picture Show (1919–60) and Picturegoer (1921–60): ‘The film press could not afford to antagonise Rank too severely because it relied, ultimately, on a steady and reliable stream of stories from the major domestic film producer’ (2016: 247). ABPC’s in-house journal the ABC Film Review commenced in 1950 and continued in production as Film Review until as recently as 2008. To read the average film fan title of the 1950s is to vicariously experience an overtly jolly realm in the same manner of certain titles of the 1990s over-relying on the term ‘edgy’ to the extent that some of the actors referred to therein seem positively rhomboid.

They were also a place where, in Richard Dyer’s words, ‘one can read tensions between the star-as-person and her/his image’ (Dyer and McDonald 1998: 61) – the ingénue with Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) training or the celluloid ‘war hero’ who preferred comedy roles. In 1955 Guy Marshall, a writer for Picturegoer, stated that a producer ‘would be crazy if you did not see to it that your stars did not parade the same personality over and over again’ (1955: 9). Within a few years, several of the younger stars in this book such as Stanley Baker, Laurence Harvey and Peter Sellers wished to exert more control over their destiny and avoid the scenario of the previous decade as described by Alexander Walker: ‘The British actor had no high pay, no tax advantages and no power of any kind in the industry at all’ (1974: 93). That power included not being defined by studio PR.

Towards the end of the 1950s cinema audiences ‘were in decline and an ever-increasing proportion of them were under-16s’ (Harper and Porter 2003: 231). As filmgoers were increasingly likely to opt for a picture featuring Tommy Steele, the latter days of Picturegoer saw it billed as Picturegoer with Disc DATE; and in 1959 Margaret Hinxman, the review editor of Picturegoer, wrote a spirited defence of the genre: ‘The dictionary defines a fan as an enthusiastic devotee and an ardent admirer. And if there were a few more such picturegoing devotees and admirers, the Rank Organisation wouldn’t be turning cinemas into bowling alleys and Laurence Olivier probably wouldn’t have to shelve Macbeth for lack of funding’ (quoted in Slide 2010: 183). But after April 1960, the magazine was billed as Disc DATE with Picturegoer.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of film magazines, there was Sight & Sound, under the editorship of Gavin Lambert and Penelope Houston. In 1947, together with Karel Reisz, Peter Ericsson and Lindsay Anderson, they formed Sequence and two years later Lambert was appointed editor of Sight & Sound, succeeded by Houston in 1955. Erik Hedling saw one of the major influences of Sequence as quickly writing off ‘most of the British cinema of the 1940s, particularly the influential documentary doctrines of John Grierson, and his belief in the utilitarian aspects of film, which had permeated much of British film criticism up to that date’ (2003: 26). The Autumn 1956 edition of Sight & Sound included Lindsay Anderson’s famous essay ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’ that heaped an abundance of ire on the Lejeune approach to criticism: ‘To a remarkable extent, in fact, denigration of cinema, denial of its importance and significance has become common (Anderson 1956: 64). Houston’s belief, as expounded upon in her 1960 article ‘The Critical Question’ was that: ‘If cinema is the art we think it is, then it is entitled to the kind of critical analysis that has been traditionally devoted to the theatre and the novel; and the principles which seem to be most likely to be constructively useful remain liberal ones’ (1960: 165). A further indispensable resource is Films and Filming, which commenced in 1954 and occupied the middle ground between glossy fan titles and the world of Monthly Film Bulletin and Sight & Sound. James Morgan of the latter title referred to the new publication’s ‘attempt at succinct popularisation’ (1955: 161). This approach also encompassed an appreciation of major actors and an indispensable legacy of Films and Filming is the tenure of Raymond Durgnat to whom virtually every scholar of British cinema owes a debt for his A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. In 1992 he argued that ‘the actor is the character’s auteur’ and how ‘the fine details of gestures, stances and intonations exposes individual attitude and their recombinations in specific situations, thus going deeper than mere typology’ (1992: 24).

And so, the sixteen subjects of this book have been selected for their power to ‘summon up, evoke, a particular historical period through their personae; thus through their personae, stars come to stand as signifiers of the time in which they achieved their greatest popularity’ (Thumim 1992: 56).⁵ The screen career of Jack Hawkins illustrates the sense of ambiguity within the patriarchy of post-war cinema. Kenneth More, at the height of his screen stardom, mirrored aspects of the social optimism of his 1950s audience; The Comedy Man (Alvin Rakoff 1964) illustrates the price of maintaining the ‘decent fellow’s’ public face. During the Second World War, the screen image of John Mills was that of a reliable working- or lower-middle-class Englishman stoically coping with life’s vicissitudes. By the late 1950s, his ostensibly stable senior authority figures often have a tolerance of subordinates and circumstance that is strained and glacial; Matthew Sweet contended that Mills’s forte was in portraying ‘the fatigued, the self-disgusted, and the men who stayed behind or who ran away’ (2005: 244).

Of the younger ‘leading men’ Stanley Baker became the first blue-collar leading man in British cinema, a decade before Michael Caine or Tom Courtenay achieved international fame. His first significant role of Lieutenant Bennett in The Cruel Sea (Charles Frend 1953) was a melange of swagger, deep insecurity and class envy and even in the stereotyped parts of his Rank Organisation career, Baker’s heavies had the quality of stillness. Virtually from the earliest days of cinema, there have been those leading players to whom their work on-screen was less important than their publicity, and for much of the 1950s, this would seem to apply to Laurence Harvey before Room at the Top (Jack Clayton 1959). The role of Joe Lampton deployed his seldom exploited talent for ambitious outsiders while his performance singing and dancing spiv in Expresso Bongo (Val Guest 1959) is akin to one liberated from a filmic, and partially self-created, straitjacket.

In the ‘leading ladies’ section, Diana Dors was the ‘bad blonde’, with a screen image that was a fusion between the publicity department of the Rank Organisation, her then husband and the actress herself. Her world was one of gin and tonics in a roadhouse somewhere in the Home Counties, with a two-tone Ford Zephyr-Zodiac parked outside and Dennis Lotis singing from the jukebox – affluent but certainly far from genteel. Sylvia Syms was, for many years, the ‘nice blonde’ of ABPC, whose genteel expression masked insight and festering anger. With the ‘comics’, Norman Wisdom’s characters are figures that hail from the traditions of Victorian live entertainment battling with the social hypocrisies of Macmillan-era Britain. Charlie Chaplin regarded him as his ‘favourite clown’, A Stitch in Time (Robert Asher 1963) was so successful behind the Iron Curtain that it was screened in football stadia and in the early 1960s, the comic’s Rank films outsold James Bond pictures in world markets. As for Leslie Phillips and Terry-Thomas, they were the perfect embodiment of the wartime ‘temporary officer’ attempting to adapt, with various degrees of success, to the 1950s and 1960s.

Pauline Kael once argued that ‘movies dictate what the producers thought people would pay to see – which was not always the same as what they would pay to see’ (1996: 100), and this applies to the members of the Rank and ABPC studio rosters. A select number of character actors became stars by public demand, such as Sidney James, one of the greatest support actors of British cinema, and James Robertson Justice, the finest embodiment of post-war ‘soppy-stern’ male authority. I will refer to the personal background of each actor only in so far as it shaped their career, but those of Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are especially crucial in the formation of images that, especially regarding the latter, became their prisons.

Finally, I have devoted chapters to two actors whose fluidity of talent often defied conventional casting. The Australian-raised Peter Finch was, quite simply, one of the finest exponents of British cinema in evoking the flaws, the human vanity and the fragility of an authority figure. His patriarchs and senior officers often conveyed a vulnerability in their fatherliness, a need to be loved more than a requirement that their rank and uniform be respected. Peter Sellers derived some of his fame from ‘internationally funded’ comedies such as A Shot in the Dark (Blake Edwards 1964), but the best use of his talents was in the exploration of the ambiguities of the British class structure. From his deluded trade union leader of I’m All Right Jack (John Boulting 1959) to the frustrated librarian of Only Two Can Play (Sidney Gilliat 1962), Sellers’s characters were often adrift in a world they did not fully comprehend.

These actors simultaneously forged and deconstructed the fable of an almost mythical country where, as Gavin Stamp put it, ‘cars are always black, there are no plastic signs, and Georgian terraces are properly grimy with dark-painted joinery’ (quoted in Lewis 1994: 385). Police cars were always black, actors’ hair was Brylcreemed, suits were sober and telephone boxes disgorged 4d on pressing button ‘B’. Roger Manvell wrote in The Film and the Public of how actors could reveal ‘on the international screen of the world’s cinemas the finer qualities of temperament and feeling and thought and spirit proper to the nations to which they belong’, and that within this ostensibly reliable and secure celluloid environment audiences were offered a presentation of the ‘national character’ by stars with the equal power to reassure and to challenge (1955: 85).

1 All of which were advertised as being ‘just five minutes from the cinema’.

2 Lower-middle-class life in the Solent region of the 1970s still had Tony Hancock and Sid James levels of enjoyment expectation.

3 A production fund derived from a cinema ticket levy – 50 per cent for the exhibitor and 50 per cent for British-based film-makers.

4 Harper and Porter point out that Board of Trade regulations regarding the ‘British’ nature of a picture allowed for an overseas producer, director and as many as two stars ( 2003 : 114).

5 One could have also included such luminaries as Kay Kendall, Anthony Steel, Robert Morley, Kathleen Harrison, Trevor Howard or Joan Greenwood; indeed, they merit a separate tome.

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Senior leads: Meet the chaps

Jack Hawkins: ‘Stand by, number one’

Jack Hawkins was born on 14 September 1910 and trained at the Italia Conti Academy. Cinema was secondary to Hawkins’s stage work for many years, and he was 42 when he became a film star with Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick 1952). His subsequent image as the square-jawed bastion of all that was decent and British belied a considerable acting range and a gift for dry comedy. Hawkins was awarded the CBE in 1958, and although he lost his entire larynx to throat cancer in 1966, he refused to allow this to halt his career. He died on 18 July 1973.

Figure 1 Jack Hawkins in The League of Gentlemen (1960)

If one wishes for an apt encapsulation of the Jack Hawkins screen persona, let us turn to that thrilling publication, the house magazine of the Westminster Bank. David Kynaston quotes this august journal as stating, ‘there are many branches where the putting on of a soft collar rather than a stiff white one will mark a man down as unambitious and unworthy of the higher reaches of his profession’ (2009: 541). In a post-war British film, one can imagine an official played by Cecil Parker, Raymond Huntley or Colin Gordon uttering such sanctimonious bilge – but rarely Jack Hawkins.

Hawkins’s cinematic fame as a senior officer was such that when the Archers were planning The Battle of the River Plate, the Admiralty hopefully enquired whether he would be in the cast (Powell 1993: 270). Dilys Powell referred to him as ‘one of the most likeable actors on the screen’ (1989: 106) and the ‘Personality of the Month Column’ of Films and Filming magazine saw Hawkins’s placing at the head of the 1954 Motion Picture Herald’s poll of money-making stars as ‘a popular verdict in every sense of the word’ (1955: 3). The actor resembled an illustration on a forces’ recruitment pamphlet at a time when the former naval officer and ex-prisoner of war (POW) Peter Butterworth was turned down for a role in The Wooden Horse (Jack Lee 1950) on the grounds that he did not look the part (Bright and Ross 2000: 119). The short and faintly rotund Butterworth did not conform to the then-prevalent image of a war hero, while Hawkins was tall and powerfully built. His characters conveyed a sense of warmth that was the antithesis to the British puritanism as identified by Roger Manvell – ‘advocating a cold rectitude of conduct which may at best have a stern kindliness about it but is seldom attractive or warm or vital’ (1955: 237). These were rarely the qualities of a Hawkins paterfamilias, who often bend or break the rules to help a member of their extended family.

Roy Lewis and Angus Maude contended that the English middle classes provided ‘most of the nation’s brains, leadership and organising ability’ (1950: 337) and when out of uniform Hawkins frequently played professionals who guided post-war society. On the surface, he represented stability during an era of anxiety that ‘worried away at the new social and sexual boundaries’ (Harper and Porter 2003: 272), but a sense of ire frequently jostled with the approachable qualities of his character. Kenneth Tynan once observed that Hawkins’s stage Iago had ‘a nicely brutal temper and a baleful braggadocio’ (1950: 90–1) and these traits were often present in his most interesting screen roles.

Jack Hawkins trained as a child actor in Italia Conti and in the 1930s he was a cinematic juvenile lead. His screen debut was in Birds of Prey (Basil Dean 1930), while a long willowy Hawkins clad in a tweed jacket and lederhosen in the Ivor Novello vehicle Autumn Crocus (Dean 1934) remains one of the more remarkable sights of any British film. After serving in the army during the Second World War – he was a colonel in charge of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) in India – Hawkins in early middle age was a heavier, more aggressive-looking figure. In 1946 he signed a three-year film contract with Sir Alexander Korda (Hawkins 1973: 109) and Carol Reed effectively used him in The Fallen Idol (1948). If the adult world within the Embassy is one of ‘marital strife, adultery, obsession and hysteria’ (Evans 2005: 84), then the police are not the archetypal genial law guardians of post-war British cinema but unapproachable oppressors. Detective Ames says little, but his glowering presence, looming down over the frightened eight-year-old Phillippe (Bobby Henrey) embodies the terror of the unknowable adult world.

It was The Archers who gave Hawkins his first post-war screen role of merit as the sardonic and manipulative government PR officer R. B. Waring in their adaption of Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room (1949). Michael Powell subsequently reflected that the actor was ‘a tall, handsome man, with shoulders so broad and chest so deep that they almost amounted to a deformity. He carried it off well. He gave the impression that he would force the pace a bit in a big role, but on the contrary, he was extremely subtle’ (2000: 48). John Ellis saw the role as ‘surprisingly effective and atypical’ (2005: 19), but because Hawkins cuts such a commanding figure, the casting is far more subversive than if Nigel Patrick or Dennis Price had portrayed the word-spinner. In this black-and-white London of shadows and smog, Waring, with his ‘big booming gestures of his arms, the huge proprietary smiles’ (Dent 1949: 23), is an almost Machiavellian figure played as one who not only understands the bureaucratic procedure but revels in its manipulation. Hawkins was equally entertaining in State Secret (Sidney Gilliat 1950) as Colonel Galcon, head of security of the Iron Curtain state of ‘Vosnia’ with an ‘Oxford accent and a Nazi attitude’ (Crowther 1950: n.p.) and Bruce Babington saw the character as ‘ironic homo politicus incarnate’ (2002: 182). The actor’s insouciant performance made it difficult to wholly dislike a villain who before the end credits is contemplating a chair of political science position in an American university.

At the end of the 1940s, there was even a final return to the pre-war juvenile with Fox’s fourteenth-century set The Black Rose (Henry Hathaway 1950) opposite Tyrone Power’s swashbuckling hero. Hawkins saw the role of master archer Tristram Griffen as a form of proto Tony Curtis (1973: 114) and the director had originally intended to cast van Johnson (Pomainville 2016: 140). The spectacle of Tristram confronting Alfonso Bedoya’s Mongolian trader Lu Ching¹ with ‘We’d do more for English blood any day than you would for an overgrown Sapphire’ was quite beguiling. The early years of the 1950s saw Hawkins gradually establish a cinematic identity as the embodiment of middle-class professionalism, in No Highway in the Sky (Henry Koster 1951)² as the level-headed English civil servant to James Stewart’s boffin and Home at Seven (Ralph Richardson 1952) as a GP. His screen association with the armed forces on-screen commenced when ABPC offered him the role of Group Captain ‘Tiger’ Small in Angels One Five (George More O’Ferrall 1951). Freda Bruce Lockhart praised Hawkins for ‘another of his tremendously strong solid performances’ (1952: 32) in the first British picture focused on the Battle of Britain.

On the surface, ‘the prevalent officer world is one of hard work, quiet confidence and stiff-upper-lip understatement, and the other ranks know their place and are jolly good chaps really’ (Armes 1978: 179), but the Group Captain is depicted as a middle- rather than upper-class professional. Andrew Spicer argues that the meritocratic professional officer, a type that had emerged in the Second World War, had become the dominant image of 1950s masculinity (2003: 33) and Small regards himself as the leader of a team. He warns Pilot Officer ‘Septic’ Baird (John Gregson) that, ‘We don’t take kindly to people who break the team’s rules’. If his dialogue has a wan, almost ritualistic quality, this could be because it is his sole method of retaining his sanity. The stiff upper lip is often to mask fear for although the Group Captain may have the skill and authority to imbue his junior officers with a sense of camaraderie and professionalism, he is powerless once they are in the air. Baird is gradually trained to be a good pilot, but this is not enough to prevent his death – a scenario that the Group Captain will continue to confront.

What Hawkins often excelled at was conveying an understated sense of pain, being obliged to nurture assimilation into a group, while constantly masking his doubts. With Mandy, the story examines the flaws of 1950s paternal figures, both in the form of Hawkins’s Dick Searle and within the wider family unit. The script by Nigel Balchin and Jack Whittingham describes how by the time Mandy Garland (Mandy Miller) is aged six her mother, Christine (Phyllis Calvert), takes her to Manchester to a school for the deaf where Searle sees Mandy’s potential and gives her private lessons every evening at Christine’s flat. Ackland (Edward Chapman), a solicitor on the school’s board of governors, wanting to discredit Searle attempts to gain compromising evidence. He falsely informs the child’s father Harry (Terence Morgan) that Mrs Garland is having an affair with the headmaster. Searle was the first of Hawkins’s civilian professionals for Ealing Studios and the teacher is pivotal in Mandy’s liberation. Early in the film we see her attack, in sheer frustration, an older child (Andrew Ray) at a park who tries to engage her in a ball game that she cannot understand. The reaction of his mother – ‘She’s insane – she’s not fit to be with other children!’ – is a diatribe delivered in shrill upper-middle-class tones that shatters the unstated fears of her father Harry (Terence Morgan, in one of his best performances). When Christine argues with her husband about sending their daughter to a school for the deaf, accusing him that, ‘You’d rather she remained dumb!’ Harry slaps her; such is his anger at the idea of his child perceived as ‘the other’. The stiff upper lip may be as much the product of fear as stoicism.

Mackendrick initially frames the school for the deaf to resemble even more of a prison than the Garland family home, with overtones of a Victorian workhouse, but it liberates Mandy, thanks to the dedication of Searle and his teaching staff. Macnab notes how in ‘sci-fi, horror and even social-problem films made after the war, it is striking how often film-makers use the expert as a buffer’ (2000: 122), but Hawkins resisted the temptation to play Searle as a plaster saint. In one remarkable scene, the headmaster is simultaneously conducting an art lesson and verbally sparring with Chapman’s pompous solicitor. As the two adults snipe, a little boy tries to gain Ackland’s attention to look at his painting, but just as the child cannot make himself understood, Searle is almost wilfully obtuse when confronted by his arrogant but socially insecure governor. Phillip Kemp suggests that the headmaster is ‘a man who has shut off a whole area of himself – incapable of sustaining an adult relationship, he deflects his emotional commitments onto the children in his care’ (1991: 80).

The most positive figures in the film are Christine, who makes the crucial decision to send her daughter to the school against the wishes of Harry, Dorothy Allison’s teacher, who eventually turns screams of frustration into words, and Mandy herself. The terrain outside of the Garlands’ house awaits and in the words of Annette Kuhn:

The mise en scène of the bombsite speaks a preoccupation that, unspoken yet insistent, pervades the entire film; the relationship between past and present. It suggests the future is rooted in the past, that the past will leave its marks on the future. The physical settings of the film’s story may appear ugly or scarred, and the older generation flawed in their inability to communicate; and yet the life, joy and energy of the new generation stand in contrast to such gloom. (2002: 44)

When Mandy takes those first tentative steps towards entering the wider community, it is a conclusion that avoids the standard Hollywood narrative of disability ‘first posed from outside as a form of stigma and then navigated from the inside as a mode of social redress’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 34). Her condition will continue to be a challenge, her parents’ marital problems remain unresolved and the terrain beyond the garden walls of the Victorian villa will always bring problems and challenges – but her move to the outside world is on her terms. Dick Searle exists between these two communities; his skills and dedication enable Mandy to develop her ability to communicate, but he has difficulty in functioning outside of the institution he regards as his fiefdom.

Hawkins’s performance in Mandy resulted in his being invited to play the leading role in Ealing’s adaptation of Nicholas Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea (Hawkins 1973: 127). Penelope Houston opined in 1963 that ‘a few years ago if British cinema had an immediately identifiable image, it would have been a shot of Kenneth More, jaw boldly jutting on the bridge of a destroyer’ (1963: 119), but this image is more applicable to Hawkins. Nor is the film a triumphal celebration of wartime achievements; the atmosphere is grey, battered and relentless, with an emphasis on the sheer strain in maintaining discipline. Harold Laski warned in The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays that ‘there is no field of activity in which the amateur, however benevolent, can retain his function as leader without risking the survival of those who depend on him’ (1939: 22) and George Ericson (Hawkins), as with Group Captain Small, is very much a professional. In peacetime, he served with the merchant marine and as a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy Reserve, he regards the newly recruited junior officers to the Compass Rose with a sense of weariness. Keith Lockhart (Donald Sinden) shows signs of promise, but his fellow sub-lieutenant Gordon Ferraby (John Stratton) already appears vulnerable and Bennett (Stanley Baker) is a posturing oaf of a first lieutenant.

Christine Geraghty has argued that British war films of this period allow ‘a safe space in which problems around masculinity can be resolved effectively’ (2000: 192) but The Cruel Sea, as with the best films within this cycle, contains no pat resolutions. Eric Ambler’s script illustrates the emotional and psychological damage of the war – Lockhart must carry out first aid on dying survivors, the sister of Petty Officer Tallow (Bruce Seton) is killed in a German bombing raid and Ferraby suffers a nervous breakdown. Most famously Ericson is reduced to tears when he recalls how his decision to depth charge a U-Boat results in the death of some British survivors – a moment prompted by the actor’s own emotions (Hawkins 1973: 136). Barr refers to ‘the sheer fuss it [The Cruel Sea] makes over even the unremarkable acts of professionalism of its Captain’ (1998: 204), but this essence of the picture is the human cost of remaining a solid authority figure. This mediation of the recent past is one of